Thorns (16 page)

"Let's not talk of Manipool," she suggested. "The stars are beautiful, though."

"Yes. I never really thought of them that way until I came back to Earth after my first voyage. We see them only as dots of light, from down here. But when you're out there caught in the crisscross of starlight, bouncing this way and that as the stars buffet you, it's different. They leave a mark on you. Do you know, Lona, that you get a view of the stars from this room that's almost as piercing as what you see from the port of a starship?"

"How do they do it? I've never seen anything like that."

He tried to explain about the curtain of black light. Lona was lost after the third sentence, but she stared intently into his strange eyes, pretending to listen and knowing that she must not be deceiving him. He knew so much! And yet he was frightened in this room of delights, just as she was frightened. So long as they kept talking, it created a barrier against the fear. But in the silences Lona was awkwardly aware of the hundreds of rich, sophisticated people all about her, and of the overwhelming luxury of the room, and of the abyss beside her, and of her own ignorance and inexperience. She felt naked beneath that blaze of stars. In the interstices of the conversation even Burris again became strange to her; his surgical distortions, which she had nearly ceased to notice, abruptly took on a fiery conspicuousness.

"Something to drink?" he asked.

"Yes. Yes, please. You order. I don't know what to have."

No waiter, human or robot, was in sight, nor did Lona see any attending at the other tables. Burris gave the order simply by uttering it into a golden grillwork at his left elbow. His cool knowledgeableness awed her, as she half suspected it was meant to do. She said, "Have you eaten here often? You seem to know what to do."

"I was here once. More than a decade ago. It's not a place you forget easily."

"Were you a starman already, then?"

"Oh, yes, I'd made a couple of trips. I was on furlough. There was this girl I wanted to impress—"

"Oh."

"I didn't impress her. She married someone else. They were killed when the Wheel collapsed, on their honeymoon."

Ten years and more ago, Lona thought. She had been less than seven years old. She felt shriveled with her youthfulness beside him. She was glad when the drinks arrived.

They came skimming across the abyss on a small gravitron tray. It seemed amazing to Lona that none of the serving trays, which now she noticed were quite numerous, ever collided as they soared to their tables. But, of course, it was no great task to program non-intersecting orbits.

Her drink came in a bowl of polished black stone, thick to the hand but smooth and gracile to the lip. She scooped up the bowl and automatically took it toward her mouth; then, halting an instant before the sip, she realized her error. Burris waited, smiling, his own glass still before him.

He seems so damned schoolmasterish when he smiles like that, she thought. Scolding me without saying a word. I know what he's thinking: that I'm an ignorant little tramp who doesn't know her manners.

She let the anger subside. It was really anger directed at herself, not him, she realized after a moment. Sensing that made it easier to grow calm.

She looked at his drink.

There was something swimming in it.

The glass was translucent quartz. It was three-fifths filled with a richly viscous green fluid. Moving idly back and forth was a tiny animal, teardrop-shaped, whose violet skin left a faint glow behind as it swam.

"Is that supposed to be there?"

Burris laughed. "I have a Deneb martini, so-called. It's a preposterous name. Specialty of the house."

"And in it?"

"A tadpole, essentially. Amphibious life-form from one of the Aldebaran worlds."

"Which you drink?"

"Yes. Live."

"Live." Lona shuddered. "Why? Does it taste that good?"

"It has no taste at all, as a matter of fact. It's pure decoration. Sophistication come full circle, back to barbarism. One gulp, and down it goes."

"But it's alive! How can you kill it?"

"Have you ever eaten an oyster, Lona?"

"No. What's an oyster?"

"A mollusk. Once quite popular, served in its shell. Live. You sprinkle it with lemon juice—citric acid, you know—and it writhes. Then you eat it. It tastes of the sea. I'm sorry, Lona. That's how it is. Oysters don't know what's happening to them. They don't have hopes and fears and dreams. Neither does this creature here."

"But to kill—"

"We kill to eat. A true morality of food would allow us to eat only synthetics." Burris smiled kindly. "I'm sorry. I wouldn't have ordered it if I'd known it would offend you. Shall I have them take it away?"

"No. Someone else would drink it, I guess. I didn't mean to say all that. I was just a little upset, Minner. But it's your drink. Enjoy it."

"I'll send it back."

"Please." She touched the left-hand tentacle. "You know why I object? Because it's like making yourself a god, to swallow a live living thing. I mean, here you are, gigantic, and you just destroy something, and it never knows why. The way—" She stopped.

"The way alien Things can pick up an Inferior organism and put it through surgery, without troubling to explain themselves?" he asked. "The way doctors can perform an intricate experiment on a girl's ovaries, without considering later psychological effects? God, Lona, we've got to sidestep those thoughts, not keep coming back to them!"

"What did you order for me?" she asked.

"Gaudax. An aperitif from a Centaurine world. It's mild and sweet. You'll like it. Cheers, Lona."

"Cheers."

He moved his glass in orbit around her black stone bowl, saluting it and her. Then they drank. The Centaurine aperitif tickled her tongue; it was faintly oily stuff, yet delicate, delightful. She shivered with the pleasure. After three quick sips she put the bowl down.

The small swimming creature was gone from Burris's glass.

"Would you like to taste mine?" he asked.

"Please. No."

He nodded. "Let's order dinner, then. Will you forgive me for my thoughtlessness?"

Two dark green cubes, four inches on each face, sat side by side in the middle of the table. Lona had thought they were purely ornamental, but now, as Burris nudged one toward her, she realized that they were menus. As she handled it, warm light flushed through the depths of the cube and illuminated letters appeared, seemingly an inch below the sleek surface. She turned the cube over and over. Soups, meats, appetizers, sweets....

She recognized nothing on the menu.

"I shouldn't be in here, Minner. I just eat ordinary things. This is so weird I don't know where to begin."

"Shall I order for you?"

"You'd better. Except they won't have the things I really want. Like a chopped protein steak and a glass of milk."

"Forget the chopped protein steak. Sample some of the rarer delicacies."

"It's so false, though. Me pretending to be a gourmet."

"Don't pretend anything. Eat and enjoy. Chopped protein steak isn't the only food in the universe."

His calmness reached forth to her, containing but not quite transferring to her. He ordered for both of them. Lona was proud of his skill. It was a small thing, knowing your way around a menu in such a place; yet he knew so much. He was awesome. She found herself thinking,
if only I had met him before they
... and cut the thought off. No imaginable set of circumstances would have brought her into contact with the pre-mutilated Minner Burris. He would not have noticed her; he must have been busy then with women like that jiggly old Elise. Who still coveted him, but now could not have him. He's mine, Lona thought fiercely. He's mine! They tossed me a broken thing, and I'm helping to fix it, and no one will take it from me.

"Would you care for soup as well as an appetizer?" he asked.

"I'm not really terribly hungry."

"Try a little anyway."

"I'd only waste it."

"No one worries about waste here. And we're not paying for this. Try."

Dishes began to appear. Each was a specialty of some distant world, either imported authentically or else duplicated here with the greatest of craft. Swiftly the table was filled with strangeness. Plates, bowls, cups of oddities, served in stunning opulence. Burris called off the names to her and tried to explain the foods to her, but she was dizzied now and scarcely able to comprehend. What was this flaky white meat? These golden berries steeped in honey? This soup, pale and sprinkled with aromatic cheese? Earth alone produced so many cuisines; to have a galaxy to choose from was so dazzling a thought that it numbed the appetite.

Lona nibbled. She grew confused. A bite of this, a sip of that. She kept expecting the next goblet to contain some other little living creature. Long before the main course had arrived, she was full. Two kinds of wine had been brought. Burris mixed them and they changed color, turquoise and ruby blending to form an unexpected opal shade. "Catalytic response," he said. "They calculate the esthetics of sight as well as of taste. Here." But she could drink only a tiny bit

Were the stars moving in ragged circles now?

She heard the hum of conversation all about her. For more than an hour she had been able to pretend that she and Burris had been isolated within a pocket of privacy, but now the presence of the other diners was breaking through. They were looking. Commenting. Moving about, drifting from table to table on their gravitron plates. Have you seen? What do you think of? How charming! How strange! How grotesque!

"Minner, let's get
out of here."

"But we haven't had our dessert yet"

"I know. I don't care."

"Liqueur from the Procyon group. Coffee Galactique."

"Minner, no." She saw his eyes open to the full shutter-width and knew that some expression on her face must have scored him deeply. She was very close to getting ill. Perhaps it was obvious to him.

"We'll go," he told her. "We'll come back for dessert some other time."

"I'm so sorry, Minner," she murmured. "I didn't want to spoil the dinner. But this place... I just don't feel right in a place like this. It scares me. All these strange foods. The staring eyes. They're all looking at us, aren't they? If we could go back to the room, it would be so much better."

He was summoning the carrier disk now. Her chair released her from its intimate grip. Her legs were wobbly when she stood up. She did not know how she could take a step without toppling. A strange tunnel-like clarity of vision brought her isolated views as she hesitated. The fat jeweled woman with a host of chins. The gilded girl clad in transparency, not much older than herself but infinitely surer of herself. The garden of little forked trees two levels below. The ropes of living light festooned in the air. A tray slicing across the open space bearing three mugs of dark, shining unknownness. Lona swayed. Burris anchored her and virtually lifted her onto the disk, though to a watcher it would not seem that he held her in so supportive a way.

She stared fixedly forward as they crossed the gulf to the entrance platform.

Her face was flushed and beaded with sweat. Within her stomach, it seemed to her, the alien creatures had come to life and were swimming patiently in the digestive sauces. Somehow she and Burris passed through the crystal doors. Down to the lobby via quick dropshaft; then up again, another shaft, to their suite. She caught sight of Aoudad lurking in the corridor, disappearing quickly behind a broad pilaster.

Burris palmed the door. It opened for them.

"Are you sick?" he asked.

"I don't know. I'm glad to be out of there. It's so much calmer here. Did you lock the door?"

"Of course. Can I do anything for you, Lona?"

"Let me rest. A few minutes, by myself."

He took her to her bedroom and eased her down on the round bed. Then he went out. Lona was surprised how quickly equilibrium returned, away from the restaurant. It had seemed to her, at the very end, that the sky itself had become a huge prying eye.

Calmer now, Lona rose, determined to shed the rest of her false glamour. She stepped under the vibraspray. Instantly her sumptuous gown vanished. She felt smaller, younger, at once. Naked, she made herself ready for bed.

She turned on a dim lamp, deactivated the rest of the room glow, and slipped between the sheets. They were cool and agreeable against her skin. A control console governed the movements and form of the bed, but Lona ignored it. She said softly into an intercom beside her pillow, "Minner, will you come in now?"

He entered at once. He was still wearing his flamboyant dinner costume, cape and all. The flaring rib-like projections were so strange that they nearly canceled out the other strangeness that was his body.

Dinner had been a disaster, she thought. The restaurant, so glittering, had been like a torture chamber for her. But the evening might be salvaged.

"Hold me," she said in a thin voice. "I'm still a little shaky, Minner."

Burris came to her. He sat beside her, and she rose a little, letting the sheet slip down to reveal her breasts. He reached for her, but the ribs of his costume formed an unbending barrier, thwarting contact